


Lex Talionis

by messageredacted



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ashen Romance | Auspistice, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Hemospectrum Shift, M/M, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 18:36:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat Vantas is an overworked blueblood flaysquadder working on the Battleship Retribution for Her Impartial Retribution, Terezi Pyrope. He really doesn't need this shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Partly beta'd by [shellfishDimes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shellfishDimes).

**Gamzee**

“I don’t care if you get it on my skin. That’ll come off. Just don’t miss my roots, Fef, I swear to God.”

Feferi scowls at Eridan, squirting more foul-smelling dye into his hair. “Shush. I’ve done this before, you know.”

She digs her gloved hands into Eridan’s hair again, working the extra dye in. You love that bright red foam squishing through her fingers, like she’s squashing up some rust grubs for dinner. She’s got a smear of dye on the inside of her wrist and another one on the front of her apron, which has been stained so thoroughly by sweeps of paint and dye that another dollop won’t matter. The words _Cull the Cook_ are almost unreadable. It’s your apron, so it looks all big and rumpled and adorable on her, enough to make you feel almost a little pale. You don’t act on that, though; she’s in one big pale pink mess with your Eribro and you’d never get yourself all tangled up in the middle of _that_.

The smell has scared most of the meowbeasts from the room, but the big orange tom is still sprawled over your knees, purring as you rub your fingers between his ears. A warm evening breeze comes in the window. Feferi hums as she moves around to get at Eridan’s hair from another angle. He squirms impatiently.

“Are you done yet?” he asks.

She swats at his left horn, then curses and grabs a cloth. As she rubs vigorously at the keratin, Eridan squawks, “You got it on my _horn_?”

“It’s fine,” she says. “It wiped right off.”

“Smells like something up and died in here,” you say, scratching under the tomcat’s chin. Crackling yellow light rises from your skin like a fine cloud of glowworms. You reach out with one lazy yellow tentacle of light and open the thermal hull door.

“It’s all these chemicals,” Feferi says, wrinkling her nose. “Henna would work fine, Eridan. I don’t know why you don’t just use that.”

“I don’t like the color,” he mutters.

“It’s practically the same color,” she says.

“Yeah, well, when it’s your life on the line we’ll talk about ‘practically the same,’ ” he snarls.

You hook a jar of kombucha from the hull and bring it back across the culinary block. The kombucha settles lightly into your hand, released by your psionics. You take a cold, sour swallow. The smell of the dye gets all up in your nose and makes it taste funny. You dump the tomcat off your lap and unfold from your chair until your horns nearly brush the ceiling.

Feferi sets down the tube of dye. “The chemicals in this dye are probably giving you cancer.”

“Good.”

She peels off her gloves. “I’m done. Set the timer for twenty-five minutes.”

Eridan picks up the plastic timer from the table while Feferi rinses off her gloves at the sink. You take another swig of your kombucha (this smell makes it taste like a motherfucking _travesty_ ) and give Eridan’s hair a critical look. His forelock is all slicked back and slimy under the bright red foam.

“It’s a miracle how all that chemical shit knows what color to make your hair,” you say. “It all stinks and burns like nothing else but it gets the job done. How does it even know what it’s doing, man? How does it _know_?”

Eridan grabs the gloves as soon as Feferi takes them off and hurries to the ablution block to check for any undyed parts. You shrug and push open the screen door leading outside, letting it bang shut behind you.

The night air is like a sweet drink of water after that foul sniffnode assault. Everything is bright and minty-green in the moonlight. You knock a couple meowbeasts off the hammock and sprawl down in it. The screen door bangs again and Feferi comes out to join you on the hammock. You hand her your drink and she rocks the hammock with one foot. Her hair is in a braid long enough to nearly brush the ground when she leans back.

“Look at those motherfucking stars,” you say, letting your shared gravity pull the two of you together in the hammock. “Looks like some motherfucker just spilled a bunch of seeds all over that sky up there.”

Feferi rocks the hammock gently, sipping your drink. “I wonder how many of those we’ve conquered,” she says.

Eridan comes out of the hive and sits in one of the chairs that you all have left in a ring around the fire pit. He’s shirtless, to avoid ruining his clothes with the dye. You can see his six bright red grub scars running down his flanks.

“Did I miss a spot?” Feferi asks.

“No,” he says grudgingly.

You’ve still got that sleep fug in your head, that sopor-in-the-bloodstream feeling from too much snooze time. It’s nice to just lay here and rock and listen to your hivemates bicker peacefully. You might get some painting done tonight, or maybe do a little baking.

Your husktop chimes in your sylladex. You open up your miracle modus, which washes light over you and Feferi. You take a moment to enjoy the show before taking out your husktop.

\-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] \--

AT: hELLO,  
AT: aRE YOU AROUND, tONIGHT,  
AT: vRISKA SAID SHE WAS COMING OVER,  
AT: i THOUGHT i MIGHT, hITCH A RIDE,  
TC: HeY tHeRe My MaIn MoThErFuCkEr.  
TC: i’M aRoUnD.  
TC: If YoU wAnT tO mAkE tHaT tRiP I’m NoT gOnNa SaY nO.  
TC: :o)

The timer goes off next to Eridan’s foot. He leaps up and disappears into the house. Feferi gets out of the hammock as well and follows him inside, leaving you to rock alone.

AT: oKAY, gOOD,  
AT: bECAUSE WE’RE ALREADY ON OUR WAY,  
AT: wE’LL BE THERE SOON,  
TC: sEe YoU sOoN.

\-- adiosToreador [AT] ceased trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] \--

You leave your husktop on your chest and stare up at the sky and wonder about those other stars up there. Sometimes it just blows your mind to think that there are other alien worlds up there, spinning happily around their little stars, so tiny you can’t even see them. There could be trolls up there looking right back at you right now, but you’ll never know it. Man, if you think about it, there could be a billion trolls all on their own planets looking around at each other right now.

You spend a while looking back at them, so by the time you get back in the culinary block, most of that prodigious stink has gone on its way and Eridan is in the ablution block with a blow dryer. You squeeze past him and paw through his many beauty products on the counter. Your reflection in the mirror is all bone and tendon and skin stretched tight.

“Fuck, Gam, wait your turn,” he says, wielding his hairdryer and comb. His forelock is that dark, rusty red that you’ve gotten used to over the sweeps that you’ve known him. Once in a while he leaves the dye out too long and you get a glimpse of his roots growing in the color of strawberries. You kind of liked it, but he hadn’t been too impressed when you’d suggested he grow it out all the way.

“Vris-sis and Tavbro are on their way,” you say. You find a jar of deodorizing paste and smear some under both your pits. It smells like myrrh.

“That’s expensive,” Eridan says, snatching it back. “Wow, Gam, holy shit, you used like half the jar.”

You offer him your armpit. “Scrape some off,” you say. He makes a face at you and you flick his forelock. He turns on the hairdryer again and goes back to styling.

You pick through the rest of the supplies on the counter. There’s a jar of Fef’s shampoo grubs. She insists on getting the free range ones because the living conditions of cage grown shampoo grubs are just tragic. At least these little guys got a taste of freedom before they were killed and put in a jar. Man, now that you think about it, that doesn’t sound like an improvement at all.

You squint at your reflection but decide that you don’t need to wash your hair. It’ll keep.

Feferi’s out in the yard again, feeding the meowbeasts. There’s about forty of them living here now and when it’s feeding time they become this big furry carpet, all meowing and purring and swatting at each other. She wades through them, putting down bowls of chopped meat that disappear under swarms of ravenous kitty-heads.

You turn on the oven and get some bowls down from the cupboard. It’s early for baking but if you’re having guests, you’d better get some shit in the oven.

Feferi comes back in while you’re measuring out sugar. She washes her hands in the sink. You take some eggs out of the thermal hull and puncture their leathery skins with a knife, then squeeze the bright green, oily yolk into the bowl. You grab a whisk and start beating the shit out of the eggs and sugar until it’s all frothy and pale.

“Oh, is Vriska on her way?” Fef says, drying her hands and watching you work. She sounds uneasy.

“None of this is for her,” you reply, shaking some flour and more sugar into a different pan and putting it on the burner. You dump in some water and vinegar.

“I’m going to call Equius,” she says.

“No need for none of that shit,” you say. “It’s gonna be fine.” You stab another egg with the knife.

She disappears into the hall. She’s probably going to get her husktop, and you know what? You’re fine with that. Everything is motherfucking fantastic. You don’t need your auspistice to help you handle seeing that black-hearted, manipulative, sadistic, narcissistic psychopath of a troll invading your hive and talking with your hivemates like she has some sort of standing invitation to be here. But if Feferi wants to invite Equius over before Vriska gets here, that’s just bitchtits. It’ll be a party. Pie for everyone.

The mess in the bowl is all grainy and thick and pale green, like that stuff Fef likes to put on her face to make her skin soft. Eridan comes in while you’re whisking in the hot sugar water slowly so the eggs don’t get all lumpy. He throws himself down in the other chair and you see that his hair is now perfectly styled. He’s also put on the nice shirt he has, like he wants Vriska to feast her filthy ganderbulbs on his pectorals.

“Uh, Gam,” he says, surveying the mess you’re making of the table. “Should I be worried?”

“No fuckin’ reason to worry yourself,” you say, dumping everything back in the saucepan.

“The deodorant… the pie…” He looks uneasy in pretty much the same way Feferi did. “…Is this for Vris?”

You snort so hard you almost inhale your teeth. You spend a minute coughing and thumping your chest to get the spit out of your lungs. The concerned crease between Eridan’s eyes smooths out.

“You can do your black tango with that cankerous bitch on your own,” you say when you can breathe again. “Tavbro is coming with her.”

He rocks the chair back on two legs. “Huh,” he says. “Tav.”

An engine rumbles outside. You’d recognize that motorcycle anywhere. Eridan rights his chair abruptly and leaps to his feet, then smooths down his hair and tries to look casual.

Your pie filling is done so you dump it into the pre-baked crust and toss the whole thing in the oven. You fetch the timer from the back yard where Eridan left it. When you come back in, the festering sore on your soul is already standing in the culinary block, grinning like a piranha. She’s dressed entirely in leather, and her black hair is tangled from the ride. Tavros hovers behind her, looking spooked.

“They were ransacking a hive down the street,” Vriska is saying. “The culling truck was there and everything.”

“It must be Equius’s neighbor,” Feferi says, concerned. She’s holding a fat black meowbeast, which purrs contentedly. “He just said he heard screaming.”

“It wasn’t the only hive,” Tavros says cautiously. You can see that his hands are clasped tightly in front of himself, his knuckles gone granite with stress. “We, um, passed a few. There were bodies.”

“Must be conscription time,” Vriska says with a shrug. She grins at Eridan. “You’re not going to let that stop you, right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Eridan does look like he’s just gotten punched in the bile sac, and you aren’t feeling so chipper yourself. Conscription drones are bad news. They’ll cull any troll who doesn’t have the right paperwork or doesn’t look right to them or maybe just because they’ve got a hankering for culling, and depending on what they’re looking for, they might scoop you up and take you away forever.

“It will be fine,” says Feferi calmly, although her voice is tight with stress. “We’ve got all our paperwork in order. They won’t cause us any trouble.”

There’s a rumble of an engine down the street. It ain’t no motorcycle. Your mouth goes dry. Eridan runs a hand through his freshly dyed hair and gives a little shrug, faking a cavalier attitude. “I got nothin’ to hide,” he says.

You go to the window and peek out. The truck is a few houses down. An adult troll in a white uniform hauls a yellowblood out of the house by his neck. Another yellowblood comes running out and gets a culling fork through the thinkpan for her trouble.

“And I don’t even live here, so they’re not looking for me,” Vriska says, although even her foul little ganderbulbs are a little wider than usual. Tavros swallows.

“I don’t, uh, have my papers,” he says. You all turn to him and he cringes a little, although he’s a tall motherfucker with a magnificent rack and he’s the most conspicuous troll in the room. Or at least, you’ve never been able to keep your eyes off him.

“Take the motorcycle,” says Feferi, dropping the meowbeast and going for the door. She makes sure the deadbolt is shut. “Go out the back door and go to Equius’s. They’ve already been there. Get out fast.”

“He’s a tealblood,” Vriska says, not budging. “What does he have to worry about?”

“Take Eridan,” Feferi says. “Vriska can stay. They’re just looking for a redblood. It doesn’t matter which redblood they find.”

“What?” Vriska says, affronted. “You want me to put myself in danger for him?”

“He… He has a condition,” Feferi says.

“Fef,” Eridan says in exasperation.

“Can I have the keys?” Tavros says to Vriska.

“You’re not driving my bike,” she replies.

“Give him the motherfucking keys,” you say.

She turns on you, her eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you give him a ride yourself? You’ve always wanted to.”

“Take the van then,” Feferi says. “The keys are in the culinary block. But you have to go now! You only have a minute!”

She’s wrong, though. It’s already too late.

The flaysquad doesn’t bother knocking. They just kick in the front door and start shouting. Sweeps of schoolfeeding has taught you what to do in a flaysquad raid. Each lime green spoonful of psychic grubpaste sank its toxins into your sponge and gave you that instinctual recoil, that muscle paralyzing shot of fear. You all drop to the floor, hands clasped over the backs of your heads, and try not to shit yourselves.

Someone grabs your horn and hauls you up. “Gamzee Makara,” you blurt out. “Yellowblood.”

The adult troll, teal, snarls at you. “Papers?”

You claw your papers out of your back pocket. Another flaysquadder, cerulean, has Fef (“Feferi Peixes, oliveblood”) and Tavros (“T-t-tavros Nitram, um, I swear I’m teal but I don’t have my papers—”). You give your papers to the troll, who unfolds the well-worn document and gives it a cursory glance before tossing it on the floor.

The flaysquadder holding Tavros takes out a thin, wicked bit of steel and whips it across your sweet flushcrush’s face. You jerk forward hard enough that the troll holding you gives you a big yank on your horn. Tavros recoils, nearly bringing his hands up to his face before remembering. A slice of bright teal opens across his face, from one eye down to the corner of his mouth. The squadder wipes a hand across that weeping gash and brings it to his mouth, tasting for that bitter flavor of blood-changing antigen. He mulls it over for a second, then wipes his hand on Tavros’s shirt and lets go of his horn. Tavros drops to the floor.

Vriska stands tall when they raise her up. “Vriska Serket, rustblood,” she says, and her voice doesn’t shake at all, although when they let her go again, she collapses to the floor like her knees gave out.

You’ve never seen Eridan so scared when he gets yanked to his feet. He can barely get out the words “Eridan Ampora, rustblood.” The cerulean squadder takes a long time studying his papers. After a long pause, he holds the papers out to the teal squadder who’s still holding you, who reads through them as well. They’re good forgeries, you know. It had taken you, Fef, Eridan, and Equius more than a sweep to get enough cash to pay for them.

“The fuck is this?” the cerulean squadder asks Eridan, grabbing his rust colored forelock.

“It’s a fucking unfortunate fashion statement,” says the teal squadder. They both laugh.

“I bleach it,” Eridan lies. It really does grow that way, but number one rule of talking to authority is that you _never acknowledge physical defects._

Feferi suddenly looks panicked, and a second later the thought occurs to you too. Did you hide the box of red hair dye? You can’t remember. Someone must have thrown it out, right? Eridan couldn’t risk Vriska seeing it.

The teal squadder tosses Eridan’s papers onto the floor. His hand is still wrapped around your horn, near the base, and it’s giving you a weirdly muffled sensation in the right half of your head, like someone wrapped you in a blanket. The cerulean squadder lets go of Eridan. You see Feferi sag with relief.

The teal squadder shakes out a telescoping nightstick one handed, and in one smooth movement, whacks it flat across your horns so hard that you actually howl. It couldn’t have hurt worse if he’d shoved a grenade in your thinkpan and pulled the pin. The floor feels like it’s traded places with the ceiling, and then keeps switching. You flail to try to keep your balance. You’re pretty sure your eyeballs are spinning in your head.

“Fuck me,” says the cerulean squadder. “That’s the biggest lightshow I’ve seen all sweep.”

You peel your oculars open and, although your eyes are jerking back and forth like someone shaking a pair of dice, you can see that there are still little yellow stars of psionics raining down from your horns, like sparks from an arc welder. You squeeze your eyes shut again because that view’s going to make your toss your cookies if you’re not careful.

Without any ceremony, the teal squadder clamps something around your throat and snaps it shut, and gives you a yank on the chain. You fall over, but the squadder keeps walking. You can’t manage to get your feet again, so you end up doing an awkward scramble as you get dragged out the door.

And the whole time you’re thinking that this must be a mistake. You’re not the one here with any secrets. Eridan’s the one in danger. They’re just going to question you some more outside. You have a pie in the oven.

The teal opens the back door of the truck, which is packed full of yellowbloods who stare warily out. He feeds your chain around a bar on the wall and padlocks it shut, then gives you a shove. You collapse into two other yellows, and the three of you lay in a terrified, unmoving heap until the teal slams the door shut and you’re left in darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Karkat**

By the time you finally raise your head from your husktop screen, you’ve long since lost the ability to focus your eyes. The clock on the wall doesn’t even make sense to you, and the fact that it takes you a few minutes to figure out where the hands go means that you really need to take a break.

You yawn, stretching. Your neck muscles feel like they’re on fire, and you rub at them with cramping fingers as you shove back your chair. The dull green glow of the screen is the only light in the room, picking out the shadow shapes of your long abandoned breakfast—dried out grubloaf with all the legs picked out and left in a fussy little pile on the edge of the plate—and six empty pods of pick-me-up. No wonder you feel like shit.

You slap the base of the lamp on your desk and it pops on, sending knives of light into your eyes and a lurch of nausea in your throat. Wow, you really should have stopped about three pick-me-ups ago. And now that you think of it, how many days ago was breakfast? Grumbling, you get to your feet and fumble blindly to find your shoes. By the time you’ve got them on your feet, your eyes have adjusted enough that you can see the room, mostly. The pile of boxes in the corner of the room is still there, two months after you moved into this office. There are three old coffee cups on the table by the couch, where you think you may have taken a nap two days ago. In any case, the pillow still has a head indent, and you don’t think you’ve been so busy that you haven’t noticed any guests.

The bathroom has that sour chemical smell of load gaper slime gone too long unchanged. Your cleaning staff knows better than to interrupt you while you’re working. You splash some water into your face and rub wet hands through your hair, trying to fluff it up a little. Your eyes are so bloodshot that the yellows are nearly as blue as the irises. Your mouth tastes rank. You rinse your mouth out with more water and then bare your fangs at the mirror. Good enough. You can probably stumble back to your quarters without someone thinking a daywalker has stowed away on board the ship.

Your headset is sitting on its charger where you left it, back out in the block. When you pick it up and cram it on your head, a cascade of purple and blue messages shimmies across your vision, blinking at varying levels of urgency.

\-- twinArmageddons [TA] 30 HOURS AGO began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

TA: you’re on a work bender agaiin, aren’t you?

carcinoGeneticist [CG] is idle!

TA: ii 2wear two god, kar, ii wiill come down there and put you iin your cupe.  
TA: iit wiill be 2o tender and pale that we’ll both be embarra22ed two talk about iit.  
TA: you’re ju2t lucky ii’ve got a ton of other 2hiit two deal wiith riight now.  
TA: or not lucky becau2e you’re goiing two 2hriivel up iintwo a 2tarved, 2leeple22 hu2k.  
TA: oh my god kar ii am not your moiiraiil. 2top makiing me worriied.  
TA: you’re not even weariing your head2et, are you?  
TA: okay well fuck you.  
TA: ii don’t even care.

\-- twinArmageddons [TA] ceased trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

You delete his messages. You’ll answer him later, once you’ve had some actual sleep and maybe food, so you can avoid him fussing. He can get disturbingly pale for an auspistice.

You open the door to your office and step into the hall, pulling the door shut behind yourself. You make sure the office is locked before you head down the hall at something marginally more composed than a shamble.

The hall outside your respite block is lit in the cool blue of your clearance level. It glows up through the translucent, segmented plastic of the floor. You can see the shadows of umbilical wires and capillary pipes down under the plastic. The floor bends up in both directions, following the curve of the ship. Centrifugal force from the spinning wheel provides the gravity in this part of the ship, and is where all the offices and higher caste respiteblocks are. You get to sleep in an actual recuperacoon, unlike those poor fucks outside the gravity ring. They get strapped into restraining nets, with a sopor pill under the tongue for good luck.

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] 18 HOURS AGO began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

GA: Lieutenant Commander Vantas

carcinoGeneticist [CG] is idle!

GA: Come To My Office When You Get This Message  
GA: It Is Not Urgent Or Else I Would Have Sent A Courier

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] ceased trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

 

FUCK. That’s not good news. Sure, Kanaya said it wasn’t urgent, but eighteen hours is a long time to make a seadweller wait. Your nap can wait.

You take an abrupt left turn at the next junction in the hallway and start down to the nearest stairwell. Kanaya has an office in the other gravity ring, where the higher echelon is located. You’ll have to pass through the zero-g area between rings to get there, right past the cellblocks. The cellblocks are in the zero gravity area because no one gives two fucks about the bone density of prisoners.

\-- arsenicCatnip [AC] 8 HOURS AGO began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

AC: :33 < *yellow eyes gleam in the darkness outside your respiteblock*

carcinoGeneticist [CG] is idle!

AC: :33 < what’s this? is the karkitty not home?  
AC: :33~ < is his respiteblock left unattended?

\-- arsenicCatnip [AC] ceased trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

carcinoGeneticist [CG] is no longer idle!

CG: DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE.  
CG: IF YOU PISS IN MY RECUPERACOON AGAIN I WILL EAT YOUR FUCKING LUSUS.  
CG: I’M GETTING SOLLUX.

arsenicCatnip [AC] is idle!

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling arsenicCatnip [AC] \--

 

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA] \--

CG: HEY.  
CG: BEFORE YOU ASK, I’M FULLY RESTED AND I’VE EATEN MY WEIGHT IN GRUBLOAF.  
CG: YUM, GRUBLOAF.  
CG: BUT IN OTHER NEWS, IT SEEMS THAT A PARTICULAR PSYCHOTIC SUBJUGGLATOR MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE GOTTEN ACCESS TO MY RESPITEBLOCK.  
TA: holy 2hiit.  
TA: whiile you were 2leepiing?  
TA: do you 2tiill have all your liimb2?  
TA: iim on my way.  
CG: WAIT. I WASN’T IN THERE AT THE TIME.  
TA: 2o you weren’t 2leepiing iin your re2piiteblock.  
CG: I HAVE A SOFA IN MY OFFICE.  
TA: 2o when you 2aiid fully re2ted  
CG: I WAS ABSOLUTELY TELLING THE COMPLETE AND UNEXAGGERATED TRUTH.  
TA: and when you 2aiid you ate  
CG: OKAY NO I ADMIT I LIED WHEN I SAID “YUM, GRUBLOAF.” FOR A DISH MADE OUT OF THE GROUND UP CORPSES OF INFANT TROLLS, IT’S SURPRISINGLY DISGUSTING.  
CG: IT’S THE TEXTURE, I THINK.  
TA: one of the2e day2 2omeone’2 goiing two comment on the 2mell comiing from your offiice.  
TA: people wiill realiize they haven’t 2een you iin about a week.  
TA: and when they break down the door they’ll fiind your corp2e, bulge iin hand, dead of malnutriitiion and two much jackiing off two paperwork.  
CG: WE’RE LOSING SIGHT OF THE POINT OF THIS CONVERSATION.  
CG: I THINK NEPETA GOT INTO MY RESPITEBLOCK AND I’M SLIGHTLY CONCERNED FOR BOTH MY HYGIENE AND MY CONTINUED EXISTENCE.  
CG: DO YOUR JOB AS OUR AUSPISTICE OR ELSE IT WON’T BE THE CONSTANT PAPERWORK WANKING THAT’S GOING TO DO ME IN.  
TA: ii’m talkiing two her now.  
TA: ii’m goiing two have her come two my re2piiteblock.  
TA: meet u2 there.  
CG: I’M HEADING TO THE CELLBLOCKS FIRST BUT I’LL BE THERE AS SOON AS KANAYA IS DONE WITH ME.  
TA: oh well don’t let me get iin the way of you hobnobbiing wiith royalty.  
TA: ii’ll ju2t be over here, moderatiing your dii2pute2.  
CG: THANKS.

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling twinArmageddons [TA] \--

You close the conversation and turn your attention to the hall. The air lock is up ahead. It’ll get you into the gravity free section. Two other bluebloods in uniform—both threshecutioners from a different flaysquad than your own—are chatting together while they wait for the doors to open. You join them, surreptitiously smoothing down the wrinkles in your own uniform. Maybe you should have freshened up. No. There isn’t enough time.

An engine whines as it spins up. After a moment, the doors to the airlock hiss open. A mixture of blues and purples, including a few subjugglators, come out. You eye all the purples but Nepeta is not among them. When the air lock is empty, you and the other waiting blues step inside.

When the door shuts behind you and the air pressurizes, the air lock disconnects with the ring and begins to decelerate. All of you sway backwards. You grab a handle on the wall and hold on as your feet start to lift off the floor. When the air lock finally comes to a stop, all gravity has disappeared. The door cycles open and you swim out into the zero g wing.

The lights here are a pale, tepid teal, marking this as a public area of the ship. The ladder rungs on the walls are polished from thousands of hands grabbing them over the sweeps. There are more trolls here of various castes. Two olivebloods have opened a grate in the wall and are working on some wires. A teal zips past with some paperwork. You even spot a seadweller pass by, barely paying attention to his surroundings as he chats on a headset. You pull yourself along the route to the cellblocks.

The cellblocks take up an appreciable fraction of the ship, and are exceeded in square acreage only by the courtrooms themselves, which are in a gravity wheel of their own. This, of course, is the same on every ship. The gears of justice are always turning.

The Headsman keeps an office near the courtrooms, which are in the second gravity wheel. You have to pass through the zero g section to get there. The zero g doesn’t bother seadwellers as much as landdwellers, although it still takes its toll. Two sweeps on this ship have taught you to move through zero g with a sort of awkward grace, but you’ll never have that inborn talent of a seadweller. This is why the astronavigaterrors and military strategists are always royal; landdwellers will never have the instinctive understanding of battle conducted in all three dimensions.

You reach the cell blocks in time to see a flaysquad leading a chain gang of prisoners out of the docking bay and into a processing room. The Empress will be pleased. The ship has been in orbit around EXPL-13 for two days now, taking on the local government’s offering of the most interesting and convoluted of criminal cases. Once the Empress has passed sentence on each case, the ship will head for the next planet and start the process over again.

Your Empress, Her Impartial Retribution Terezi Pyrope, takes her task as the adjudicator of the realm very seriously. She investigates every situation thoroughly and separates out truth from lie with a cunning mind, and then executes all parties involved. Under her rule, with the help of her massive hierarchy of adjudicants, nearly eighty million criminals on the two hundred and sixteen planets of the Empire meet justice every month.

You follow a curving hallway, lined on the left by windows looking out into the prisoner pens. Each plexiglass pen is filled with groups of prisoners, floating together and spinning gently, slowly dragged together by their own personal gravity. They all have their horns capped in resin to prevent any accidental (or intentional) goring, since a dead prisoner is one who has escaped justice.

The second airlock awaits, and once you’ve boarded, it spins up to match the rotation of the second gravity wheel. Gravity settles on you, dragging you down to the floor. Your empty stomach gurgles uncomfortably.

The hallway lights here shade from teal to cerulean to blue to purple. You pass rows of glass-faced offices, full of busy trolls. The Headsman’s office is up a set of stairs. The subjugglator guarding the door looks unimpressed when you give him your name.

“You’re late,” he says.

You don’t have an answer that doesn’t sound disrespectful (“I came as soon as I saw the message” or “She said it wasn’t urgent” won’t put you in the best light) so instead you just apologize and try to look meek. He opens the door.

“Lieutenant Commander Karkat Vantas,” he announces when you step into the room.

The Empress’s Headsman is oiling her chainsaw. She doesn’t look up. You stand inside the doorway, hands clasped behind your back, and wait.

Kanaya Maryam is a seadweller, sleek and well fed. Her uniform, rich purple, is what happens when a fan of military chic fashion becomes head of the military and then redesigns all the uniforms. It almost makes you want to rush to your nearest recruitment office to reenlist, even though you’re only halfway through your six sweep service.

She finally looks up when her chainsaw is once again an instrument of well-oiled death. One eyebrow arches.

“Karkat,” she says. “You haven’t slept.”

“I’ve been processing the reports from my flayquad’s last mission, Your Excellency,” you say.

“I appreciate your dedication,” she says. There’s a hint of amusement in her voice. “If you’re so busy with paperwork, maybe I shouldn’t have interrupted.”

Your spine stiffens. “I’ve finished with my work for the week, Your Excellency” you say immediately.

She folds her hands on the tabletop. “Karkat,” she says with a sigh. “This isn’t official business. You can relax.”

You do relax marginally. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier,” you say cautiously. “I only just put on my headset.”

She waves a hand, dismissing that. “We’re scheduled to head to EXPL-A1938 after we finish here,” she says, toying with the cloth she’d used to oil her chainsaw. “It was just annexed ten sweeps ago.”

You’re aware of this. The fight to conquer exoplanet A1938 was a particularly bloody war, and most of its native sentient life was destroyed, but it’s well suited for troll life. A lot of the Empress’s supply lines have rerouted there to establish a number of colonies.

“Things have settled down there enough that they’ve been judged worthy of matriorb installation,” Kanaya continues. Her lip curls slightly in disgust and she tosses the oil rag away.

“Aradia is meeting us there,” you say in sudden understanding. The jade-blood is an matriorb midwifereaver. She roams backwater planets looking for good places to install new matriorbs.

Kanaya growls slightly. The purple-rimmed fins on the sides of her neck flare. “Worse,” she says. “She’s meeting us _here_ and traveling with us.”

“On this ship?” you say uneasily. “For… a week?”

She meets your eyes. “I can’t murder her. It would be bad for society.”

“You’re not going to murder her,” you say firmly. “You can make it through a week. I’ll be at your side the whole time.”

“If she says a word to me—”

“I’ll talk to her,” you say. “Anything she says will go through me first. As long as you agree to do the same. You can’t be alone with her, and if you even feel an urge to kill her, _you tell me first_.”

Normally you would break out in hives at the thought of speaking to a seadweller like this, but you’re her auspistice, and the bonds of ashen romance are far stronger than the bonds of blood caste. Kanaya nods slowly and inhales through her nose. “Okay.”

“I’ll be here the whole time,” you say. “And so will your moirail. It’ll be fine.”

“Terezi will have other concerns,” Kanaya says. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

“When does she get here?”

“She took a corsair from Alternia last week. She should arrive in orbit within the next forty-eight hours.” She looks at you again. “Go get some sleep, Karkat. You can’t auspisticize if you’re sleep deprived.”

“I’m fine,” you protest, but her expression firms and you know the period of casual conversation has come to an end.

“I’ll send for you when I need you,” Kanaya says. You nod.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” you say.

She turns back to her chainsaw and you back out the door. The guard sends you another disapproving look. You turn on your heel and head back toward the air locks.  


* * *

  
You’d promised Sollux that you would head straight to his quarters, but you know that if you show up at his quarters looking like you do, he’ll start fussing over you. Honestly, it’s a little scandalous. You think he has strong pale leanings toward you, which is really sketchy for an auspistice. If he were pale for you, it would mean he would be biased in your favor when he had to mediate between you and Nepeta, and that would pervert the entire ashen relationship.

You take a quick detour to the flaysquadder ablution chambers. You dump your grungy uniform into the sterilizer and then dunk yourself into a vat of exfoliating mucilage. The process of scraping off the mucus is relaxing, and when you finally towel your hair dry, you actually feel refreshed. You still look like you were beaten with the sleep deprivation stick, but not as much as you did before.

Sollux is only a ceruleanblood, so he shares quarters with three other blockmates near the core of the wheel. You can hear noises coming from inside the block as you approach. When you push the door open, you find Sollux and Nepeta sitting on the floor, game grubs in hand. The amount of slime under the grub console tells you that they’ve been playing games for a while.

“KK, come watch me kick Nep’s ass,” Sollux says as soon as you come into the block. Nepeta cackles. They’re both fixated on the screen. No one else is around and it looks like the other three ‘cupes are empty. You suspect his blockmates vacated at the first sign of subjugglator.

On the screen, a ceruleanblood threshecutioner is fighting what appears to be a yellowblood cavalreaper. You guess that Sollux is the threshecutioner, since he has a level 80 threshecutioner rainbow drinker in Troll World of Warcraft. Right now, Nepeta’s psionic cavalreaper is sending banana yellow blasts of energy at him while he bobs out of the way.

“Kill her for me,” you say, parking your butt on the floor next to Sollux.

“He can try!” Nepeta giggles. She’s in full subjugglator regalia right now, with big greasepaint fangs smeared over her lips.

Sollux doesn’t take his eyes off the screen, but you can see him frown. “KK, I can’t help if you’re going to intentionally provoke her.”

“He’s not provoking me,” Nepeta says, executing a particularly skillful move that drops Sollux’s threshecutioner to half its hitpoints. “He’ll have to work a lot harder to do that.”

Sollux pauses the game, possibly because he’s about to lose. “Okay, let’s get this over with. NP, what were you doing in KK’s respiteblock?”

Nepeta tosses down the game grub and grins at you. “I was purrfectly innocent! Yesterday I found an anonymous fanfic account full of Troll All My Wigglers quadrant vacillation fic and I wanted to show Karkat, be-claws it was posted under the IP address of someone in his flaysquad. I was concerned about misuse of government resources.”

“What!” you yelp.

“Since you weren’t there, I showed it to everyone else in your flaysquad and reported it to your commander,” she adds.

“What I do in my PRIVATE HOURS—” you start.

“Stop!” Sollux says. “Karkat, if you’re trying to be anonymous, use an onion router. Nepeta, you were only doing it to piss him off.”

“E-fur-ything pisses him off,” she points out.

“I thought I told both of you to stay as far from each other as possible.”

“It’s my job to enforce the law!”

“Your superior would understand if you pass the job over to someone else because of ashen quadrant conflict of interest,” Sollux says. “And no, that’s not permission to start reporting Karkat for every violation you can get to stick. Karkat, stop abusing your internet privileges.”

“I wasn’t! You can’t prove that I did any of that during work hours,” you say.

“All your hours are work hours,” Sollux says.

“Oh, so now you’re complaining that I actually take time off once in a while?”

Sollux sighs. “I’m not complaining about anything. Come on, KK, stop picking fights.”

“I’m not—” you start.

“I pissed in your recuperacoon,” Nepeta adds.

You leap to your feet. “I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT ANYMORE.”

Sollux buries his face in his hands. “Nepeta…” he groans.

“Sweet dreams!” Nepeta says, getting to her feet as well.

You start to draw your sickle but Sollux wedges himself between the two of you. He’s taller than you both so it works. “ENOUGH!” he says. If you were both lower caste, he’d be able to mind control you into obeying, but as it is he manages to quell you both with a glare. “BOTH OF YOU, SIT DOWN.”

With a bit of grumbling, you both sit down on the floor again on opposite sites of him. Sollux glares down at you both.

“Karkat, do you respect my judgement?” he says.

“Yes,” you say grudgingly.

He turns his head. “Nepeta?”

She crosses her arms over her chest and nods.

“Are you both going to listen to me?” He waits for you to both nod. “Okay. Nepeta, I know you enjoy provoking Karkat. Karkat, I know you can’t help flipping out over everything, and you’re probably already thinking of ways to get back at her. Stop it, both of you. We all know how this will end. Someone’s going to die, and if we’re being honest, it’ll probably be Karkat. Shut up, Karkat, you know it’s true. I like you both and I don’t want you dead, so you’re both going to try your very hardest not to be such complete failures at obeying simple commands. Deal?”

“Fine,” you say.

“Yes,” says Nepeta.

“Good. Now get some sleep, Karkat.”

Nepeta grins and probably plans to say something except Sollux sends her a look.

“You can use my ‘cupe,” Sollux adds. “Nepeta, I’ll see you later.”

“You’re just kicking me out because I was going to win,” Nepeta says.

“We’ll have a rematch tomorrow,” Sollux promises.

“You can take time to practice,” Nepeta says. She gets up and makes a show of completely ignoring you as she gathers her stuff to go. Sollux shows her out.

You remain sitting on the floor. As soon as Nepeta is gone, Sollux opens the footlocker at the base of his ‘cupe and rummages through it.

“She has a secret account where she RPs as a cat lusus—” you start to say.

Sollux flings a package of dried grub bites at you. “Eat those and shut the fuck up,” he says.

“You’re not my moirail,” you say, but you peel open the plastic. The grub bites are leathery and wrinkled, with that soft velvety skin that grubs only have in their first instar. Yum. You toss like five of them in your mouth at once.

“No, I’m just here to keep you alive until you get one,” Sollux grumbles. “Seriously, KK, you’re a mess. Maybe you should ask for some down time.”

“I can’t,” you say around a mouthful of grub. You swallow and say, “I’m auspisticizing for the Headsman for the next week.”

“The Headsman,” Sollux says. “I know it’s blasphemy to question her judgement, so I have to think that she just uses you as an auspistice as a joke.”

“Her Excellency doesn’t really joke,” you say.

“I wouldn’t know,” Sollux says dryly, dropping into his desk and opening his husktop. “Go to sleep.”

You tip the rest of the bag of grub bites into your maw. “If I wake up and find you stroking my hair, you’re fired as my auspistice,” you say.

“If you wake up at all, consider yourself lucky,” Sollux says, starting to type. “Now shut up. I have work to do.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Tavros**

The shuttle into orbit smells like hot plastic and body odor. There are fifteen other trolls in here with you, ranging from oliveblood to cerulean, and, like you, they’re all wearing ill-fitting suits and looking uneasy.

You keep drumming your fingers on your knees, which makes a metallic tapping noise that is clearly irritating the troll on the bench next to you, but you can’t seem to make yourself stop. You’re nervous. Everyone is. Everyone here on this shuttle is heading into space for a chance to make a petition to the Battleship Retribution while it’s still in orbit.

You have the paperwork all in order on the husktop in your sylladex. It has been stamped and approved by six different under-adjudicators. That doesn’t mean you’ll be successful, of course, but it means you have every right to make the petition.

The shuttle is windowless and slightly claustrophobic. The walls, made of opaque white plastic, taper in at the ceiling. The only seat available to you was one by a wall, but because your horns are so wide, you have to sit sideways. You have a cramp in your back and you’re only six hours into your eighteen hour flight. Nothing you can do about that, though. They were going to force you to purchase two seats to accommodate your massive rack, but you couldn’t afford that. One seat was exorbitant enough.

For the sixth time so far this flight, you pop your husktop out of your sylladex and flip it open. You just want to check the paperwork again to make sure.

DATE: 24/986/2/29601  
PETITIONER: Nitram, Tavros  
CASTE: #008282  
PLANET: EXPL-13  
RANK: Unenlisted  
PETITION:

aTTN: sOLLUX cAPTOR,

pETITIONER WOULD LIKE TO FILE, a COMPLAINT, oN BEHALF OF A FELLOW TROLL, gAMZEE mAKARA, cASTE #a1a100, oF THE SAME PLANET, wHO WAS ILLEGITIMATELY DRAFTED ON 24/983/1/29601,

mAKARA HAD A DRAFT EXEMPTION, [sEE aPPENDIX c], dUE TO PAST MIND HONEY ADDICTION, aND IS NOT FIT FOR SERVICE, aND THEREFORE, sHOULD BE RELEASED,

tHANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME,

[electronic signature attached]

 

It’s the best you can do. Hopefully it’ll be enough, and you’re not already too late. The Alternian Empire was established on a millennia of bureaucracy, and even with everything requiring paperwork submitted in triplicate, the wheels of the draft move quickly. Gamzee might have been processed already.

Depending on how far into the process he is, there might not be anything left for you to save.

You realize you’re drumming your fingers on your knee even faster, so you force yourself to stop. You close your husktop and recaptchalogue it. Enough. You’ve read that document so many times that you’ve memorized it. Maybe you should get some sleep so you’ll be fresh and alert when you arrive.

Ha. As if you could sleep on this shuttle.

You take out your husktop again.

\-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling cuddlebeastCuller [CC] \--

AT: yOU SAID HIS NAME WAS sOLLUX cAPTOR, rIGHT,

There’s a pause while the in-flight wireless transmits the message back down to EXPL-13. Finally Trollian tells you that Feferi is typing.

CC: Yes!  
CC: Write it down, silly.  
AT: sORRY,  
AT: i DID, bUT, tHEN i THOUGHT MAYBE i WROTE IT DOWN WRONG,  
AT: sO i WANTED TO MAKE SURE,  
CC: Make sure to ask for )(im specifically.  
CC: A friend of a friend of a friend said t)(at )(e’s one of t)(e few w)(o actually gave )(er a fair trial.  
CC: NOT T)(AT T)(-E OT)(-ER TRIALS AR-EN’T FAIR!!!  
CC: Of course t)(ey are!!!  
CC: All trials are fair under )(er Impartial Retribution!  
CC: But Captor is an exceptionally good interrogatorturer because )(e can compel petitioners to tell t)(e absolute trut)(.  
AT: wHAT IF, i ANSWER INCORRECTLY,  
CC: You can’t!  
AT: bUT, i’M VERY GOOD AT MAKING MISTAKES,  
CC: Tavros, we sent you for a reason.  
AT: bECAUSE i’M THE HIGHEST CASTE, oF ALL OF US,  
CC: Because we believe you’re t)(e rig)(t person for t)(e job!  
CC: We wouldn’t )(ave sent you if we t)(oug)(t you couldn’t do it.  
CC: W)(o do you t)(ink we s)(ould )(ave sent in your place? Eridan?  
AT: i DON’T THINK THAT WOULD BE, tHE BEST IDEA,  
CC: Vriska?  
AT: nO,  
CC: Equius?  
AT: hE WOULD BE OKAY, iF HE WASN’T SO LOW CASTE,  
CC: And of course I couldn’t go because my moirail needs me!  
AT: wHAT i’M HEARING IS NOT THAT i’M THE RIGHT PERSON FOR THE JOB,  
AT: bUT, rATHER, tHAT i’M THE LEAST WRONG PERSON,  
CC: Tavros, )(onestly, you’re going to be fine.  
CC: We’re all counting on you.  
CC: I know you’re going to do your absolute best.  
AT: i’LL TRY,  
CC: T)(at’s all we’re asking!  
CC: Gamzee wouldn’t want anyone else to come save )(im.  
CC: I don’t want to betray )(is confidence but I’m fairly certain )(e was flus)(ed for you.  
CC: IS flus)(ed, I mean.  
AT: uH,  
CC: You know t)(at, rig)(t?  
AT: i, uH,  
CC: Yea)(, I t)(oug)(t so.  
CC: Bring )(im back!  
AT: uH,

\-- cuddlebeastCuller [CC] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT] \--

That did not make you feel better.  


* * *

  
Docking procedures take an hour, which somehow seems longer than the whole rest of the flight, since you know that the Battleship Retribution is only a few feet away. Your mouth is dry, and your eyes are itchy from the recycled air, and you really have to pee. You have sweat rings under your arms.

When they finally let you off the shuttle, you debouch into a loading bay which is packed full of trolls. Five other shuttles have arrived at the same time and are in various stages of letting off or taking on passengers. You scan the faces of the trolls in the waiting area who are ready to leave the ship, and wonder how many of them had their petitions granted. From their faces, you suspect the answer is close to zero.

Teal lights in the plastic floor direct you further into the ship. The hallways split off in different directions, funneling passengers toward their various destinations. You duck into an ablution chamber and relieve yourself, then splash some exfoliation mucilage onto your face and, surreptitiously, under your pits. You scrub it off and try to smooth the wrinkles out of your suit as much as possible. You’ve got some respiration deodorizers in your sylladex, so you let one melt under your tongue while you fluff up your mohawk.

Another troll comes in, decaptchaloguing a change of clothes while she does so. She ducks into a stall. Oh no, why didn’t you think of that? That was a great idea. You’re wearing your only suit. You can be so dumb sometimes.

You duck back out into the hall and start following the signs. Petitioners who haven’t started the petition process yet need to proceed to holding pen 439. You hope that doesn’t mean that you have to pass through 438 more holding pens before you get to have your petition heard, but knowing the Empire, that’s very likely the case.

After a few wrong turns, you find the holding pen, which is a long, brightly lit room with a few rows of chairs, all of which have been taken. There’s a reception window in the far wall, with two trolls on duty. The line wraps around the entire circumference of the room.

It takes you two hours to get up to the front of the line, where the bored tealblood on duty takes your name and caste and gives you a fingerprint-smeared tablet to fill out. There still aren’t any available chairs so you find a spot on the floor. You have your husktop excrete an information grub with your paperwork, and feed that into the tablet to populate the form with your information. Then you get back in line.  


* * *

  
\-- cuddlebeastCuller [CC] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] \--

CC: )(ow is it going?  
AT: fASTER THAN i EXPECTED,  
AT: i’M IN HOLDING PEN 219,  
CC: ...Out of )(ow many?  
AT: wELL, i STARTED IN 439, bUT i WAS ABLE TO BYPASS PENS 382-301 BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF MY COMPLAINT,  
AT: sO i SHOULD BE IN THE SINGLE DIGITS IN ANOTHER EIGHT HOURS,  
AT: tEN AT THE MOST,  
CC: W)(en does t)(e Battles)(ip Retribution leave orbit and )(ead for its next planet?  
AT: i THINK THAT’S IN 24 HOURS,  
AT: i HEARD A RUMOR THAT IF THEY HAVEN’T HEARD MY PETITION BY THEN,  
AT: iT’S AUTOMATICALLY REJECTED,  
AT: sO i’M GOING AS FAST AS i CAN,  
CC: Well if you’re done in eig)(t to ten )(ours, you’ll )(ave plenty of time!  
AT: nO,  
AT: tHAT’S JUST WHEN i GET TO HOLDING PEN ONE,  
AT: tHEN i START ON ANTECHAMBER 90,  
AT: bUT i’VE HEARD THAT THOSE GO PRETTY FAST,  
AT: cOMPARATIVELY SPEAKING,  
CC: 38/  
CC: I wis)( t)(ere was a better way...  
CC: NOT T)(AT T)(IS WAY ISN’T JUST AND IMPARTIAL!!!  
CC: But I )(ope you manage to )(ave your case )(eard.  
CC: It would be ----EXTR---EM--ELY DISAPPOINTING if we couldn’t get Gamzee back because we ran out of time.  
AT: i KNOW,  
AT: i’M GOING AS FAST AS i CAN,  
CC: No, it’s not your fault.  
CC: It’s t)(e fault of our R-EFR-ES)(INGLY FAIR AND UNBIAS-ED government.  
CC: You can’t rus)( justice.  
AT: tHIS IS TRUE,  
AT: i AGREE BOTH COMPLETELY AND UNIRONICALLY,  
AT: oH WAIT THEY JUST CALLED MY NUMBER,  
AT: i’M GOING TO HOLDING PEN 218 NOW,  
AT: i’LL TALK TO YOU LATER,

\-- adiosToreador [AT] ceased trolling cuddlebeastCuller [CC] \--  


* * *

  
In fact, you make it into antechamber 90 in just over nine hours, but then you breeze through antechambers 90 through 49 in only two more hours. You’ve been subsisting on grub bites from your sylladex and a few pick-me-ups that Vriska gave you before your trip. The pick-me-ups leave you shaky and dehydrated, but at least you haven’t fallen asleep. You don’t want to run the risk of not hearing your number when it’s called, because then you’d have to start over.

At around antechamber 13, you get a message on the court-provided tablet.

TO: Nitram, Tavros  
FROM: Adjudicator 9409  
RE: Case #2934857-139801-3352  
MESSAGE:  
Proceed to interrogatorture room #523 to present your petition.

Understand the following:

* You have fifteen minutes to make your case.  
* You will not be allowed to appeal the decision of the court.  
* You will be required to submit to a full mind excoriation by the interrogatorurer on duty.

By proceeding to interrogatorture room #523, you agree to these terms and conditions.

Excoriation? Is that…painful? You rub at the base of your horn uneasily, then gather your things and hurry to the door of the room. The security officer glances at your tablet, then points you down a hallway.

Interrogatorture room #523 is near the core of the gravity wheel. Gravity here is only a third of the amount you’re used to, so you feel like you’re nearly bouncing as you walk down the hall. When you reach the door, you’re not sure whether to walk in or knock. You hover outside the door for a minute, distressed, and then knock tentatively. After a moment, someone says something, which you decide to interpret as an invitation to enter.

Two trolls are in the room, both sitting on a slightly raised dais. There is no other chair in the room. You shuffle into the room nervously.

“Please state your name,” says one of the trolls. He’s wearing subjugglator facepaint that makes him look like a bat. You’ve never seen a subjugglator in person before. Your bowels have already turned to water, and he probably hasn’t even started using his chucklevoodoos on you. The other troll is a cerulean blood, with an odd double set of horns. He’s wearing a pair of glasses that have one blue lens and one red one.

“T-T-Tavros Nitram,” you say. There’s a faint hum overhead. You glance up to see a projector turn on. Your petition has been projected onto the wall to your right.

“State your case,” says the subjugglator.

“I’m, uh, here on behalf of Gamzee Makara, a yellowblood,” you say. There’s a tickling feeling in your mind, like a spider has crawled into your skull. You sneak a glance at the ceruleanblood again. Is this what excoriation feels like? You thought it would be worseklajhgla _skjdfh_ —  


* * *

  
When you come to yourself again, you’re still standing in the interrogatorture room, but the clock on the wall has jumped forward fifteen minutes, and you’re sweating as if you just sprinted up ten flights of stairs. Your mouth is very dry. Have you been talking this whole time?

The ceruleanblood has been typing. The subjugglator glances down at his tablet and taps something, then pushes back his chair.

“Your case has been dismissed for lack of evidence,” the ceruleanblood says, finishing up his typing. He has a bit of a lisp due to a set of fangs that hang over his lower lip. “You can follow the signage back to the loading dock.”

“Whuh—” you say.

The subjugglator rises to his feet, paying no attention to you whatsoever. He mutters something to the ceruleanblood, who nods and closes his husktop.

“But—but Gamzee is—” you stutter, completely floored. “But he had an addiction to mind honey! He can’t be drafted for helmsman service! He had an exemption!”

“The decision has been made,” the ceruleanblood says. “You gave up your right to appeal when you entered the room.”

“But I—how would I have appealed before I—” You abandon that thread of logic. “My case should have been heard by interrogatorturer Sollux Captor. I wrote that on the paperwork.”

The ceruleanblood looks at you as he rises to his feet and captchalogues his husktop. “It was,” he says.

“They told me you would hear my case fairly!” you say, and then hastily add, “ _Not that there was anything unfair about this judgement._ ”

The subjugglator steps out of the room through a door behind his desk, paying so little attention to you that it’s like you stopped existing after the judgement was made.

Captor looks like he’s about to follow the subjugglator out.

“How did I lose the case?” you beg. “I don’t even know what I said!”

“There’s an exemption to the exemption,” Captor says, sounding reluctant. “The psionic’s power levels were too high for him to be absolved from service.”

“But he just got clean,” you say. Your voice is wobbling. You’re afraid you might start crying any minute. “He was a monster on mind honey. He’s been sober for half a sweep now.”

“I’m sorry,” Captor says, edging to the door.

“They told me you’d give us a fair trial.”

He sighs, like he’s heard that a thousand times. “Just because you didn’t win doesn’t mean it wasn’t fair.”

“He’s my matesprit,” you lie desperately.

“Even if you weren’t lying, which I know you are because you just testified under mind control that you two were not quadranted, that wouldn’t have any impact on the judgement.”

You have run out of things to say. Captor slips out the door and it shuts behind him.

You lost.


	4. Chapter 4

**Karkat**

The passenger loading bay smells like fear and desperation. This is nothing like the flaysquad loading bay, located on the other end of the ship, which smells like excitement and patriotism.

Normally you would never be caught dead down near this particular loading bay, but the shuttle of the matriorb midwifereaver and her support team is set to arrive in an hour and the Headsman has tasked you with babysitting Aradia for the entire time she’s on the ship.

You’re looking forward to seeing Aradia, actually. It’s been a while.

Most of the trolls sitting in the loading bay are looking shellshocked. They’ve probably all come from the courtrooms. As a flaysquadder, you’re not really involved in this part of the government. Your flaysquad hunts down criminals, enforces order, and does regular involuntary enlistment runs. If you’re lucky, the only time you’ll come into contact with a petitioner is when they do something egregiously criminal like attack an adjudicator.

The light over the gate switches from mauve to chartreuse, telling you that the shuttle has arrived and is currently in the middle of docking procedures. This will take a while. You’re sitting in a chair by the door, trying not to breathe too deeply. Most of the trolls waiting at this gate have seen the business end of the holding pens and could use a good mucilage scrape.

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

GC: Is She Here Yet  
CG: THE SHUTTLE IS JUST DOCKING.  
GC: Do You Think It Would Be Too Insulting To Give Her Quarters In The Lower Caste Gravity Wheel  
GC: She Is Lower Than Teal After All  
CG: SHE’S NOT JUST “LOWER THAN TEAL.” SHE’S A MIDWIFEREAVER.  
CG: SHE’S KIND OF A BIG DEAL.  
GC: Yes But I Dont Want Her In My Gravity Wheel  
CG: SHE’S NOT GOING TO ATTACK YOU IN YOUR SLEEP.  
GC: I Am Aware  
GC: I Just Dont Want Her To Breathe The Same Air As Me

The gate light shades from chartreuse to a slightly greener lime. You can hear a few loud clanks now as the shuttle gets clamped into place.

CG: YOU’RE LOOKING FOR WAYS TO INSULT HER.  
CG: I’M GOING TO KEEP HER DISTRACTED, BUT IF YOU INTENTIONALLY INSULT HER, IT’S GOING TO BE HARD.  
CG: JUST BE POLITE AND WE’LL GET THROUGH THIS.  
GC: Fine

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--

You sigh and wait. After another fifteen minutes, the gate light has edged firmly into teal territory. With a hiss, the gate slides open. Two crew members come out, and then the passengers disembark.

You haven’t seen Aradia in a good five sweeps, but you recognize her as soon as she steps off the shuttle. The jade blood nearly glows, mostly due to the colony of phosphorescent parasites that helped turn her corpse into a rainbow drinker after the Headsman murdered her the last time the two of them met. Aradia has her long hair wrapped up neatly between her two curling horns, and is wearing a very tight pair of pants made of musclebeast leather.

“Aradia!” you say, approaching her. She looks startled, then grins.

“Karkat,” she says, and gives you a big hug that nearly cracks your ribcage. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“I’m your welcoming committee,” you say.

“I should have guessed.” She grins wider, showing you a delicate set of fangs. “She’s afraid of retaliation, isn’t she?”

“Not at all,” you say. “I volunteered because I hadn’t seen you in a while.”

She introduces you to the rest of her team, though you promptly forget everyone’s names. The loading bay is emptying.

“I’ll show you to your quarters, but do you want food first? There’s a restaurant that does great musclebeast steaks on level fourteen,” you say. “Or, uh. Do you still eat food?”

“I like a rare steak now and then,” she says. “Lead the way.”

“Aradia?”

You both turn. One of the few remaining passengers in the loading bay has failed to get on the shuttle. Instead, he’s loitering next to your group, tugging at a loosened tie and shifting from foot to foot. He has that hollow-eyed look of a failed petitioner.

“Sorry,” you say to Aradia, equipping your sickle. “Let me take care of this.”

She ignores you and steps forward. “Oh my god, _Tavros_? Is that really you? It’s been ages!”

She gives him a big hug, then steps back and looks down at his legs. “You got prosthetics?”

“I saved up,” he says. “You, uh, you—weren’t dead the last time I saw you…”

“Oh.” She waves a hand dismissively and shoots you a look over her shoulder. “Someone’s juvenile attempt at black flirtation. I’m over it. What are you even doing here?”

Tavros glances toward the gate. The last of the passengers are just boarding. “I had a petition,” he says. “My, uh, friend was illegally drafted…”

Oh even better, he’s one of those petitioners. “If you lost your case, it means it wasn’t illegal,” you point out. “You could be arrested for slander.”

“You’re not leaving now, are you?” Aradia asks, shooting you a quelling look. “Do you want to join us for dinner?”

“I bought a ticket for that shuttle,” he says. “I’m sorry. I can’t afford another one.”

“I’ll buy you a ticket for a later one,” Aradia says. “It’ll be fine! Come with us.”

You sigh but she completely ignores you. Tavros looks uneasily at you, then at Aradia, and then over his shoulder at the gate. “Okay,” he says cautiously. “Thank you.”  


* * *

  
You show the whole group to an ablution chamber where they can freshen up, and you drop enough hints about the clothing sterilizer that Tavros uses it. His suit doesn’t come out any less wrinkled, but it doesn’t have that holding pen funk about it anymore.

The rest of Aradia’s team begs off to head to their quarters. You give them directions, and then you, Aradia and Tavros head to the restaurant.

The restaurant on fourteen is pretty empty at this time. The host seats your party by a set of fake windows that show a live feed of the outside of the Battleship _Retribution_. Exoplanet 13 revolves slowly, its blue oceans sparkling under a froth of clouds. A shuttle zips past the window, sailing down into the gravity well.

“Order anything you like,” Aradia tells Tavros, dropping into her chair. “It’s on Karkat’s tab.”

You sigh but wave a hand. It’s not really on your tab—it’s on the Empire’s, and the Empire can spare a few caegars on a tealblood’s lunch. “How do you two know each other, anyway?”

“We were FLARP partners back when we were wigglers,” Aradia says. She grins at Tavros, who is sitting uncomfortably next to you. “Team Charge.”

“Really? You FLARPed?” you say distastefully.

“Want to know a secret?” Aradia glances around the mostly empty restaurant and then leans in, lowering her voice with exaggerated care. “Her Impartial Retribution was a FLARPer too. Her teammate was a redblood.”

“Really,” you say doubtfully.

“We were all wigglers,” Aradia says with a laugh. “Who cares? Things like that don’t matter pre-Ascension. What ever happened to that redblood, anyway? It was Vriska, right? Is she still alive?”

“Yeah,” says Tavros, toying with a spoon on the table. “She’s still… Vriska.”

“You mean you still see her?”

“She and I were, sort of, matesprits?” Tavros says, sounding like he’s not too sure of it himself. “I mean, not really matesprits, but we kind of… made an attempt?”

“Oh god,” says Aradia in a sort of horrified relish. “You poor masochistic fuck.” She glances at you. “Vriska can talk to the dead, so she was always doing things like sending ghosts of the recently departed to haunt people. Poor Tavros jumped off a cliff when they came after him. Broke his spine.”

“And you still dated her?” you say.

Tavros shifts uncomfortably. “It was, uh, a matespritship of convenience.”

“The drones showed up?” Aradia said sympathetically. “I get that. Ugh, I hate the thought of Vriska-wigglers crawling around somewhere, though. Maybe I’ll talk to someone about tracking them down and turning them into soup stock.” She giggles at Tavros’s horrified look. “Kidding! They’d probably taste _terrible_.”

The waiter shows up at that moment and takes your orders. Tavros gets the cheapest thing on the menu. Aradia asks for a glass of clotted blood and a side of grub poppers. You double the order of grub poppers and get your steak as rare as it comes.

“So how are things on the _Retribution_ , anyway?” Aradia says when the waiter leaves again.

You shrug. “The same. Did I tell you Sollux is my third leaf now?”

“Really! Congratulations. For you and who else?”

“Some subjugglator,” you say, trying not to grimace. “You’ve never met her.”

“When you said Sollux,” Tavros interrupts quietly, “Did you mean Sollux Captor?”

“Yes,” you say. “Did he work on your case?” If this is going to lead to a rant about the injustice of the courts, you’re going to have him thrown out, no matter what Aradia says.

“They told me to ask for him by name because he was supposed to help,” Tavros says.

“Well you can’t expect him to bend the law for you,” you reply.

“What was the case?” Aradia asks.

“My friend is a yellowblood,” Tavros says. “He, uh, was a mind honey addict, so he was exempted from service, but he, um. They took him anyway.”

“Was he powerful?” you ask.

Tavros nods.

“There you go. That’s automatic conscription right there,” you say. “Surely an under-adjudicator could have told you that and saved you the trouble.”

“He murdered two trolls in his last mind-honey rampage,” Tavros said. “It was a bad addiction.”

“If the risk outweighs his talent, they’ll have him destroyed,” you say. “But you won’t see him again in any case.”

Tavros stares down at the table. Aradia shoots you a frown and rests a hand on Tavros’s shoulder.

“Is he a quadrantmate?”

Tavros shakes his head miserably. “He was flushed for me,” he says. “I think I was… I don’t know. I think I might have been flushed for him. I never got a chance to tell him.”

Despite yourself, you feel a little bad for the guy. A tealblood should know better than to get involved with a yellowblood, but you can understand that red feelings don’t always develop rationally. It’s not as if that isn’t the basis of every romance novel ever. Hell, there’s a burgeoning subgenre of romance fiction involving doomed romances with soon-to-be helmsmen. You don’t really read those, though; you’ve never been a fan of unhappy endings.

“Could there be a chance?” Aradia asks you. “Maybe you could pull a few strings?”

“You mean break the law,” you say flatly. Aradia winces slightly.

“No, that’s not what I meant at all. I just mean that if Tavros’s friend really is a… poor fit for helmsman duties, you could advocate that he be returned home. It would save the culling fee.”

“If he’s too dangerous to be used for helmsman duties—” you start.

“Then he can be enrolled in a rehabilitation program,” Aradia finishes.

Tavros is watching your conversation, his teal eyes flicking back and forth between the two of you. He’s a big troll, but he sits in a hunched-over way that makes him seem smaller than he is, as if he’s trying not to intrude.

“I can put in a request,” you say. By the time the form makes it through bureaucracy, the troll will be long dead, but that’s not your problem.

“We’ll go see him,” Aradia says to Tavros. “We can check to see if he’s been processed yet.”

“I have a lot of work,” you say to her.

“I guess I could have the Headsman escort me,” she replies archly.

You start to protest but then just sigh. “Fine,” you say grimly. “We’ll go.” You shift your attention to Tavros. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

Tavros nods eagerly, already looking like a barkbeast hearing the sound of its master arriving home. “I understand,” he says.

The waiter returns with your food, and the next few minutes are spent eating. The conversation shifts to Aradia’s job and her on-again, off-again redrom with a coworker. When you’re done and the bill has been settled, Aradia hooks her arm around yours.

“Let’s go helmsman hunting,” she says.  


* * *

  
Most trolls that are caught by the involuntary enlistment squads are processed on their home planet. Usually they’re lowblooded trolls with psychic powers for which the military has a use.

However, trolls with particularly strong powers, especially potential helmsmen, are often brought to the _Retribution_ for processing. Her Impartial Retribution will distribute them to those ships judged most deserving. In other words, they’re political capital. To that end, they’re kept separate from the general population of criminals.

You walk the two of them down to the air lock, and you feel a sense of schadenfreude when the wheel syncs with the zero-g cellblocks and Tavros flails around like a meowbeast that’s been dropped upside down. Aradia catches him and guides him to a couple handholds on the wall.

“I don’t want any heroics when you see him,” you say to him. “If you make a scene, you’ll be culled. Get it?”

Tavros nods, gripping the handholds tightly. “I get it.”

You head down the hall, slower than normal so the landlubber can manage without colliding with other trolls. You have actually never been in the psionic cellblocks. You’ve never had reason to enter. You have to admit that you’re a little curious.

The entrance is guarded by two bluebloods. They let you pass when you show your credentials, although they side-eye Tavros and Aradia. Aradia just grins at them cheerfully, fangs bared.

“Madame Midwifereaver,” one of the bluebloods says respectfully to her, and lets the three of you through.

The doors slide open to let you into an antechamber. It feels like you’ve just wrapped yourself in cotton and are shuffling across a rug. Your skin prickles and your uniform begins to cling uncomfortably to your skin. You can taste electricity.

Aradia’s eyes widen a little. “What’s that?” she says.

The handholds on the walls here are all insulated in rubber. “It’s a few dozen powerful psionics in close quarters,” you say, as if you know what you’re talking about.

There are another set of guards in here. These prisoners are higher priority than the regular ones, so it requires extra security. The two guards, one blue and one purple, both look at you suspiciously.

“Do you have authorization to be here?” the purple asks.

“I’m here looking for a helmsman for my ship,” Aradia says without missing a beat. “Lieutenant Commander Vantas is giving me the tour.”

“This is Midwifereaver Megido,” you say.

The blueblood’s eyebrows lift. The purple studies you both, then nods once.

“Go ahead, then,” she says.

You pass through another set of doors and into a long corridor. Doors on both sides of the hall look into individual cells, each one insulated. It’s like visiting an aquarium. A yellowblood floats in each cell, nude. The cells are barely large enough for the troll inside, and are filled with a pale blue power-deadening broth. Tubes snake into various orifices, maintaining each troll’s sedated state.

“Oh god,” Tavros says, looking down the row of cells.

“Which one is he?” you say.

Tavros shakes his head, moving more quickly now, looking into each cell. Suddenly he stops, grabbing a handhold on the wall. His momentum pulls his body around to bump into the plastic window, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. “Gamzee!?”

You and Aradia catch up to him. Your first impression of the yellowblood is that he’s a long-limbed mess of a troll, with wild curly hair in a halo around his head.

His eyes flicker open a little, just a slow, sleepy blink of yellow. He’s a knuckly creature, a collection of ribs and femurs and knobbly joints. 

“Gamzee?” Tavros says again, touching the window. Gamzee’s fingers move slightly but he doesn’t seem to be aware enough to even make eye contact.

Tavros looks blindly over his shoulder at you and Aradia. His eyes are wobbly with teal tears, and the jerky movement of his head makes little zero-g teal droplets go flying off in every direction. “Can we—can I talk to him? Can he be, um, woken up?” he says shakily, wiping at his eyes with the back of one wrist.

Aradia looks at you.

You look at Gamzee.

_He’s_

_so_

_fucking_

_pitiable._

You’ve never really understood the idea of “pity at first sight,” but you think you might just have a problem on your hands.


	5. Chapter 5

**Tavros**

It is _remarkably fair and just_ that the flaysquad shuttle can get you planetside in only four hours, and with a lot more legroom. Flaysquadders, you think, must be better people morally. Otherwise they wouldn’t have such access to luxurious air transport.

Karkat paces the aisle for much of the flight, reading reports on his tablet with a furrowed brow. He does most things with a furrowed brow, you’ve learned.

Aradia had stayed behind on the Battleship Retribution to work with her matriorb team, so this shuttle flight is just you and Karkat and the whir of the engines. Shuttles are too unimportant for helmsmen, of course, so the shuttle is piloted by an AI. 

\-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling cuddlebeastCuller [CC] \--

AT: fEFERI,  
AT: aRE YOU THERE,  
AT: i’M ON MY WAY BACK,

A pause. You hadn’t contacted her immediately after the hearing because you couldn’t face telling her the news, but now’s the time.

CC: )(ow did it go?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?  
AT: wELL,  
CC: T)(ANK GL’BGOLYB!!  
AT: nO, i MEAN, i WAS JUST STARTING MY SENTENCE WITH THE WORD WELL, i DIDN’T MEAN THAT IT WENT WELL,  
CC: O)(.  
CC: So t)(en...  
AT: wE LOST THE HEARING,  
CC: I...  
CC: I guess I can’t say I’m surprised.  
CC: 38’(  
AT: tHERE IS SOME GOOD NEWS,  
AT: sORT OF,  
AT: i MEAN, iT’S PROBABLY BAD NEWS,  
AT: iN THE SENSE THAT IT’LL GET OUR HOPES UP,  
AT: aND THEN TURN OUT TO BE NOTHING,  
AT: bUT ANYWAY,  
AT: a FLAYSQUADDER HAS TAKEN ON OUR CASE,  
CC: But flaysquadders don’t really do t)(at sort of t)(ing, do t)(ey?  
AT: nO,  
AT: i THINK THIS IS A SPECIAL CASE,  
AT: hE WANTS TO CHECK OUT gAMZEE’S RECORDS,  
AT: tHAT WHOLE MURDER RAMPAGE THING,  
AT: aND SEE IF HE CAN GET gAMZEE RELEASED,  
CC: W)(y?  
CC: I mean, I appreciate it, but I don’t really understand.  
AT: i’M NOT SURE,  
AT: kARKAT IS KIND OF HARD TO READ,  
AT: hE SEEMS TO BE ANGRY ABOUT IT,  
AT: bUT I’M NOT SURE IF HE’S ALWAYS ANGRY,  
AT: wE WENT TO SEE gAMZEE,  
AT: mAYBE IT WAS PITCH AT FIRST SIGHT,  
AT: oR SOMETHING,  
AT: sO WE’LL BE LANDING IN FOUR HOURS,  
CC: I’ll bring t)(e van to pick you up.  
AT: tHANKS,  
AT: i DON’T THINK KARKAT WILL STAY LONG,  
AT: tHE BATTLESHIP RETRIBUTION IS SUPPOSED TO LEAVE ORBIT IN TWELVE HOURS, aND IT’S EIGHT HOURS ROUND TRIP WITH THIS SHUTTLE,  
AT: sO HE NEEDS TO INVESTIGATE QUICKLY,  
CC: Couldn’t )(e investigate from t)(e s)(ip?  
AT: nO, bECAUSE, bUREAUCRACY,  
AT: iT TAKES TOO LONG, tO SEND IN THE RIGHT FORMS,  
AT: tHIS IS FASTER,  
CC: Well, I wis)( )(im t)(e best of luck.  
CC: I’ll see you soon!

\-- cuddlebeastCuller [CC] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT] \--  


* * *

  
You’re too stressed out to snooze on the shuttle ride, even though you’re exhausted. Karkat’s taking up the aisle with his pacing, though, so you can’t walk around to get rid of your own restless energy. Instead, you recline your chair all the way and bring up old chatlogs on your husktop. You skim through old conversations that you’ve had with Gamzee. It makes your chest feel tight and anxious, but you can’t stop yourself.

You don’t know if you’re flushed for him. You like him a lot, and you certainly don’t want him to die or be turned into a helmsman. You consider him your best friend.

Wow, if only figuring out your relationship with Gamzee was the biggest issue you had to deal with right now.

“He must not have a moirail,” Karkat says suddenly. He’s at the end of your row of seats. You jump, startled. You hadn’t seen him come over.

“No, he, uh, doesn’t,” you reply, struggling to sit up respectfully.

“There wasn’t anyone to talk him down when the mind honey got to him?”

“He has an auspistice.” You finally manage to get the seat to stop reclining. “But Gamzee wasn’t really able to listen to reason? Equius was lucky to get out alive. He was nearly strangled to death.”

“Good,” Karkat says absently, studying his tablet again.

“Uh, good?” You stare at him. He looks up again.

“All helmsmen get administered doses of mind honey. That’s how they can make the jump to FTL,” he explains slowly, as if he’s talking to a wiggler. “A tiny percentage have bad reactions to it, and that’s not safe for the ship. Yellowbloods with mind honey addictions aren’t uncommon, but usually those are pretty easy to control. If Gamzee’s one of the few who really can’t handle it, he’ll be completely unfit for helmsman duty. We just have to prove that this was more than a routine freakout. The fact that his auspistice couldn’t talk him down will work in our favor.”

“But if that’s true, won’t they, uh, cull him?” you say.

“Yes,” Karkat says. “We’ll worry about that later.”  


* * *

  
Feferi is waiting in the van at curb outside the shuttle station when you debark. Eridan is not with her, and you suspect he might be in hiding for as long as Karkat is around. You’re not entirely certain what’s up with Eridan, though you’ve heard Feferi mention his “condition” before so maybe he has some sort of cullable deformity or something.

Karkat takes one look at the van, which has been painted with frolicking meowbeasts, and stops dead in his tracks. “I’m going to commandeer a vehicle,” he says, turning back toward the doors to the station.

“You only have, two hours,” you say, pulling open the side door to the van. The seats inside have been felted with cat hair, since the meowbeasts tend to sleep in the van when it’s parked at the house. “This is faster.”

Feferi hops out of the van and opens the passenger’s side door for Karkat. “Please make yourself comfortable, Lieutenant Commander,” she says.

“Gamzee painted the van,” you add.

Looking disgruntled, Karkat climbs into the passenger’s seat. You get in the back and shut the door again. 

“Take me to the county adjudicator,” Karkat says. “I sent in the requisition forms while we were on the shuttle here, but I’ll have to kick them around until they hand them over.”

“Yes, sir,” says Feferi, pulling away from the curb. She’s wearing olive green skirts and a chartreuse blouse, and has a daisy tucked in her hair that you recognize from their garden. She’s also barefoot. Next to Karkat in his crisp uniform, she looks nearly feral, but Karkat does look mildly impressed when she wrestles the big van into the heavy traffic without a hitch.

“Thank you for taking on Gamzee’s case,” Feferi says. “We all appreciate your help.”

“How do you know him?” Karkat asks, typing into his tablet.

“He lives with my moirail and I. We were all wigglers together.” Feferi’s voice is carefully polite. You’re glad she’s here. Eridan is so resentful, and Equius is so obsequious, that you think Karkat would have snapped, but Feferi is calm in a crisis.

“I’ll want to stop by your house after I get this paperwork. Tell the auspistice to be there so I can interview him,” Karkat says as Feferi swings the van around a corner and then brakes in front of the local adjudication chambers. On the front steps stands a marble statue: a troll with a blindfold, holding a set of scales. Her horns are short and sharp.

“Of course,” Feferi says.

“Wait here,” Karkat says, getting out of the van. You watch him glower back at the mural on the side of the van, then stalk up the steps to the chambers.

“He’s pleasant,” Feferi says to you over her shoulder, double parking the van. Angry horns honk behind you.

“He’s, uh,” you start, and then you can’t think of an appropriate way to finish the sentence, so you let it dangle.

A siren sounds behind you. You and Feferi both tense up. Feferi pulls away from the curb, but before she can move out into traffic again, a flaysquad truck comes screeching up beside the van. Feferi stops and rolls down her window.

A flaysquad culler gets out of the truck, culling fork at the ready, but doesn’t approach Feferi’s window. The back door of the truck opens and a subjugglator bounces out. She has ferocious fangs painted on her face.

She cackles with delight as soon as she sees the mural on the side of the van. “I a-purr-rove!” she says, approaching Feferi’s window. “You have a fur-y nice van, oliveblood.”

“Thank you,” Feferi says.

“You’re illegally parked, you know,” the subjugglator adds cheerfully. She circles around the front of the van and pulls open the passenger’s side door, then hops into the seat that Karkat so recently vacated.

“We just dropped off Lieutenant Commander Vantas at the adjudicator,” Feferi says. “He told us to wait here.”

The subjugglator looks at you in the backseat. Her smile is sharp and terrifying. “I know! I saw that he had requisitioned a shuttle to the planet’s surface and I was curious, so I followed him.” She leans forward conspiratorially. “He has a hiss-tory of misuse of flaysquad funds.”

“I was not aware of that,” says Feferi. She glances at you in the rearview mirror. You shrug miserably.

“So what’s he up to in such a hurry?” the subjugglator asks.

“He told us he had requested some forms from the adjudicator’s office but was afraid they wouldn’t arrive before the Battleship Retribution left orbit,” Feferi says. You could kiss her. She’s far better at this than you would be.

The subjugglator’s smile widens. She switches her attention to you. “And you, tealblood? What were you doing on the shuttle with him?”

“I, uh,” you say. Your mind goes blank. “I was petitioning the courts and, uh, I was going to go home, but, um, I didn’t, because I missed my shuttle, and I had dinner with, uh, Midwifereaver Megido, because we used to FLARP together, and she told me to miss my shuttle because we hadn’t seen each other in so long…” Her intense gaze is flustering you. You have to end this as fast as you can. “And then Lieutenant Commander Vantas said I could hitch a ride with him, because I’d missed my shuttle, and, uh, he was going in the same direction.”

“Vantas is so kind-hearted, isn’t he,” the subjugglator coos.

“He’s, uh,” you say.

“Exactly,” she says. She turns her attention to the steps of the adjudicator’s chambers. “Oh, look. Here he is now!”

Karkat has stopped halfway down the steps and is viewing the flaysquad truck with the same expression he used on the kitten mural. After a moment, he finishes descending the steps and approaches the van. The subjugglator rolls down her window.

“Karkat!” she says.

“Nepeta,” he replies flatly.

“I mentioned to your commander that your trip should be supervised after your last misuse of government resources, and he agreed.” She smiles at him.

“I’m messaging Sollux,” Karkat says, whipping out his tablet.

“Do we want to do this now? We don’t have much time before we need to head back. Surely you have work to get done!” Nepeta stretches like a satisfied cat.

Karkat hesitates, then scowls even deeper. He pulls open the back door to the van and climbs in.

“Go,” he says to Feferi.

Nepeta leans out and waves to the flaysquad truck. The flaysquad culler gets back in the truck and the truck pulls away, leaving you be. Feferi pulls the van back into traffic, taking advantage of the wake the flaysquad truck has left.

Karkat types furiously into his tablet. Nepeta twists around in her seat to watch him.

“What’s this trip all about, Karkitty?” she says. “Paw-fully suspicious, isn’t it?”

“Oh, and your trip isn’t?” he snaps. “Does your supervisor know about your conflict of interest? Did you forget to mention _again_ that we have an auspistice?”

Oh _no_. The last thing you need right now is an ashen meltdown right here in the middle of saving Gamzee. Feferi, appearing to have the same thoughts as you, accelerates sharply.

“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” she says.  


* * *

  
The two flaysquadders bicker the entire ride to Feferi’s house. Feferi’s displeasure is reflected in how heavy her foot becomes on the accelerator. You get there in eight minutes, which is a relief.

Equius is waiting on the front lawn, looking sweaty and anxious. As soon as you pull into the driveway, he rushes up to open Nepeta’s door, head-bobbing respectfully.

“Please make yourself at home,” he begs, retreating to let her out. “I’m at your service, highblood.”

Karkat opens the back door to the van and gets out. Equius makes an abortive move to help him open the door. Karkat grumpily waves him away.

“Is this the auspistice?” Karkat says over his shoulder to Feferi. She nods.

“Equius Zahhak,” Equius says.

“Whose auspistice were you, brownblood?” Nepeta purrs.

“I was the auspistice for Gamzee Makara and Vriska Serket, ma’am,” Equius answers immediately. “I mean, I am their auspistice.”

“Makara is one of Her Impartial Retribution’s helmsman candidates,” Karkat tells Nepeta testily. “I’m here to interview him about Makara’s suitability.”

“I don’t remem-purr this being one of your responsibilities!” says Nepeta, stalking around Equius like she’s about to pounce. Equius is easily three times her size, but you have no doubt that Nepeta could win in a fight. For one, Equius wouldn’t fight back.

“I don’t remember you being my supervisor,” Karkat replies.

“Let’s get this started,” Feferi interrupts politely. “We can talk inside.”

Karkat and Nepeta glower at each other but let Feferi usher them into the house. As you suspected, Eridan is nowhere to be seen. Feferi shoos meowbeasts from chairs to give everyone a place to sit. Nepeta crouches down to stroke a meowbeast.

Karkat declines to sit. He gives Equius a sharp gesture. “Tell me about Makara’s incident with the mind honey. We don’t have much time.”

Equius sits on the edge of his own chair. “Gamzee had an… excessive reaction to mind honey,” he says in that slow, precise way of his.

“Excessive how?” Karkat asks.

“He destroyed his hive and murdered two of his neigh-bors when they tried to reign him in. Feferi called me to come stop him, but there was nothing I could do.”

“This was after he had been on the mind honey for how long?”

“It was his first time taking it. After that, he disappeared for half a sweep.”

“It was his _first time_?” Karkat says. “And he killed two trolls? How much did he take?”

Equius glances at Feferi, who shrugs. “I canter—-fiddlesticks. I _can’t imagine_ it was much. He had very little income.”

“How did you stop him?”

“I didn’t.” Equius looks down. “He strangled me with his psionics and left me for dead.”

You can remember it clearly. Eridan had called Vriska to let her know that Equius was injured and that Gamzee might be coming for her. Gamzee had never shown up, though. Instead he’d spent half a sweep nearly feral, keeping far away from all of you.

Karkat tips his tablet onto the table. There’s a photo of smoking ruins on it. He points at it. “This was his hive?”

Feferi leans over. “Yes,” she confirms. “He’s been living with my moirail and I since then.”

Nepeta creeps over to the table to look at the picture too. “Looks like a powerful helmsman,” she says.

“Useless if he just explodes when he’s exposed to mind honey,” Karkat says.

Nepeta sniffs. “He can be trained.”

“He can’t,” you say. “He’s Gamzee.”

“Well then he’ll be culled,” Nepeta replies, looking at you. She laughs. “Did you think they would release him?”

You wring your hands in sick anxiety. Nepeta looks from you to Karkat. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You want to find some way to get him released. What is this helmsman to you, Karkitty?”

“He’s just a helmsman,” says Karkat.

Nepeta studies him, then grins in delight. “Karkitty, that’s ADORABLE. Which is it, pale or red?” She licks her fangs. “Hmm. I think it’s pale.”

“It’s _nothing_ ,” Karkat says. “Look, just let me do my job here, okay?”

“Purr-roceed, Lieutenant Commander.”

Looking slightly flustered, Karkat turns back to Equius. “Do you know what Gamzee did while he was missing for half a sweep? Did he ever tell you?”

Equius looks uncomfortable. The armpits of his shirt are tea-colored with sweat. “He told me he didn’t filly—er, fully remember what happened. He was upset about it. I don’t know if that was true, though. It’s possible he didn’t want to saddle us with the details.”

“He told me he was delusional,” you add in quietly. “He said he believed he was the messiah.”

Karkat taps at his tablet. “Ok. That’s probably enough evidence. I’ll present this to Her Imperial Retribution.”

Nepeta snatches the tablet out of his hand. “As supervisor of this trip, I’ll present the report myself,” she says. “You’re welcome.”

Karkat yanks it back. “Not fucking likely.”

Nepeta growls, and a pair of razor sharp claws unsheathe from her sleeves. Karkat decaptchalogues a sickle. You shrink back. Feferi backpedals away from the two of them. Equius, who is caught in the middle, tenses.

“Maybe this is time to contact your auspistice,” Feferi says in a very calm, very controlled voice, as if she’s talking a jumper off a ledge.

Nepeta’s growl rises in pitch. Karkat tightens his grip on his sickle.

You frantically decaptchalogue your husktop.

\-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling apocalypseArisen [AA] \--

AT: dO YOU KNOW, hOW TO CONTACT sOLLUX cAPTOR,  
AT: iT’S KIND OF AN EMERGENCY,  
AT: pLEASE SAY YOU’RE THERE,  
AT: aND THAT YOU DO,

apocalypseArisen [AA] is idle!

“I think it’s time to finish this,” Nepeta says. “Don’t you, Karkitty?”

“I’m very sorry,” Equius says, rising to his feet between the two of them. “Please forgive me, highbloods. My actions are disgraceful.” He takes hold of Nepeta’s arm. “I’m willing to accept all consequences of this act.” He closes his hand over the metal claws and squeezes them until they warp.

“LET GO,” Nepeta howls, fighting to free herself from Equius’s iron grip. She fails. “I WILL GUT YOU.”

Karkat is watching the ruckus, looking startled. His sickle dangles at his side. You sidle up to him.

“I think it might be, um, time to go,” you say.

He blinks and then looks at you, then at the time on his tablet. “Fuck,” he says. “Let’s run.”

Equius is talking to Nepeta in a calming voice while she shouts at him. Feferi catches your eye and then grabs the van keys. You hustle Karkat out the door.


	6. Chapter 6

**Karkat**

Requesting a formal audience with Her Impartial Retribution would be hard for some people, but you send a quick message to Kanaya begging a favor. By the time your flaysquad shuttle arrives back at the Battleship Retribution, there’s a message in your inbox granting you an audience.

You have a few minutes to freshen up and change into your dress uniform, but not much more time than that. You nearly sprint for the airlock taking you to the courtblocks.

The antechamber holds a half dozen trolls waiting their turn to speak directly with the Empress. Some of them look like they’ve been waiting hours. When you give your tablet to the guards at the door and they usher you right in, you can feel the death glares at your back.

You don’t pay that any mind, though, because without much fanfare, you are now standing in front of Her Impartial Retribution, Terezi Pyrope.

Terezi is a sinewy whip of a troll, all bony angles that aren’t softened by the magenta brocade coat and soft purple leggings she wears. Her seadweller fins fan gently at the sides of her neck. Her horns rise to lethal points above her head. When you stop in front of her, you can see your own reflection in the crimson glasses she wears.

“Karkles!” she exclaims cheerfully, captchaloguing the tablet she was reading.

“Your Excellency,” you say, bowing deeply.

She waves that off impatiently. “Kanaya said you had something important to talk about.”

You fumble your tablet out of your sylladex. “It’s about one of the Helmsman candidates that was brought in on the most recent sweep of EXPL-13. He was flagged as being a past mind honey addict, but when I looked into his file, I found that he’s had a severe reaction to mind honey in the past and he would be a poor fit for Helmsman duty.”

Terezi stares at you. Or, well, her face is turned your way. She strokes her chin.

“Have you mistaken me for a Helmsman engineer? I know the similarities are striking,” she says.

You plow on. “Normally this would be caught once he was already being processed for duty, but I thought that since he hasn’t gone through that process yet—” (you hope this is still true) “—maybe he could be released back to his home planet before we leave.”

She tilts her head to the side. “Why?”

This is the trick of it. “His hivemates came to petition for his release. He should have been exempt from the process anyway.”

She smiles, showing rows of sharp teeth. “Karkles, you didn’t answer my question. Why?”

“It doesn’t cost the Empire anything to let him go. I can cover the transport fees.”

She waits. She’s always been able to see your intentions better than you could yourself. It’s what makes her a cunning adjudicator and the most impartial and just leader of the Empire. It also makes it really fucking hard to hide anything from her.

“I, uh, I think I’m pale for him,” you confess.

She sits back in her throne. Wine dark leather creaks. “You want me to release a defective Helmsman candidate back to his hivemates rather than cull him because you’re pale for him,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Karkat.” She sounds almost pitying. “You know why I can’t do that, right?”

“It’s not playing favorites,” you insist. “I’m not asking you to remove a useful Helmsman from duty. He’d just be culled anyway! It’s no loss.”

“It’s not the cost of one troll that’s important here,” Terezi says. “How can you justify giving one Helmsman candidate special treatment, when there are thousands of rejects being culled every day? If we send this one back to his hivemates, we’d have to consider doing the same for any one who requested it. And that would add up. It already costs us money to round up candidates and process them. Having the rejects culled is a way of cutting our losses. If we had to ship them all back to their hives, we’d be hemorrhaging caegars.”

“It’s just one troll,” you say.

“It’s never just one. We’d be setting a precedent.”

“But—” You’re desperate. “But he just—”

“I’ve made my decision.” She straightens up. “You’re dismissed.”  


* * *

  
The Battleship Retribution is undergoing its final preparations for leaving orbit. The last shuttles are leaving the shuttle bays. Cargo is being secured for the shift in gravity, since once the ship begins to move, gravity will relocate to the direction of the thrust. Nonessential personnel are strapping themselves into their bunks. You will be leaving in a little more than an hour.

Aradia is delicately sipping a glass of teal blood in the foyer of her suite. She raises her head when you enter, and takes note of your dejected expression.

“I see,” she says. She waves you over. “Tavros has lost his friend?”

“Yes,” you say. You approach her and sit down in the chair across from her. A holographic window looks out over the planet. The stream of shuttles heading into the gravity well has slowed to a trickle.

“What was the reasoning?”

“It’s not fair to the other cullbait if we spare this one.” You hunch your shoulders. For a little while there, you’d thought you might have a chance to fill a quadrant. A slim chance, yes, but more than you’d ever had so far in your life.

“So he’s as good as culled.” Aradia chews at her lip with one long rainbow drinker fang. “What will they do with the remains?”

“It’s processed for biofuel.”

She smiles slightly. “All that blood, going to waste.”

You look at her distastefully and her smile widens a little. She decaptchalogues her tablet and types for a moment, then puts it down on the coffeetable between you two before returning for her drink.

“Auspisticize for us, darling,” she says.

You pick up the tablet.

\-- apocalypseArisen [AA] began trolling grimAuxiliatrix [GA] \--

AA: ive heard a rum0r that there is g0ing t0 be a defective helmsman candidate culled s00n  
AA: ive always wanted t0 taste the bl00d 0f a p0werful psi0nic  
AA: they say its extra fizzy  
AA: as y0ur guest im making a f0rmal request f0r the bl00d 0f gamzee makara  
AA: i h0pe y0u d0nt let y0ur petty quibbles cause a dipl0matic incident  
AA: 0u0

grimAuxiliatrix [GA] has blocked you!

You look up at her. “Aradia,” you say.

She raises her eyebrows at you. “Run!” she says.

You run.  


* * *

  
Kanaya is in her personal blocks, but she lets you in wordlessly when you arrive.

“Aradia told me she made you a personal request,” you say by way of greeting. You don’t have time for the formalities.

“She has,” Kanaya says, testily snapping her desk up flush with the wall, where it will be out of the way during flight. “I was under the impression that you would be fielding any requests.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was going to do it until she already had.”

She turns to face you. “I refuse to do her any favors. Not when she asks them with that tone of utter disrespect.”

“Refusing her would be an insult,” you say cautiously.

“ _She used that stupid smiley face_ ,” Kanaya hisses.

“It is stupid,” you agree. “But if you knowingly let that blood get used for biofuel—”

“I know,” she snaps.

There’s a distant rumble as first one, then another engine starts up. The floor vibrates slightly under your feet.

“But if there isn’t any blood at all, how can you give it to her?” you say.

Kanaya raises one eyebrow at you. “What do you mean?”

You shrug, trying to look as if the idea has just occurred to you. “Well, I’m pretty sure I ran into one of this yellowblood’s quadrantmates petitioning to have him released. The petition was denied, but you have the authority to reverse the decision, don’t you? If he’s not on this ship at all, you really can’t be faulted for not granting her request.”

Kanaya stares at you for a long moment. You resist the urge to tell her to hurry up. The engine noise is getting louder.

“Reversing the decision of the courts isn’t exactly just,” she says.

You nod, as if it doesn’t matter to you either way. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to do as Aradia requests.”

Kanaya’s eyes narrow. She whips out her tablet and types something in. “Fine,” she says. “It’s done.” She smirks tightly. “I’ll take great pleasure in letting Aradia know I can’t fulfill her request.”  


* * *

  
You don’t know which shuttle it is that sends Gamzee back down to EXPL-13. You spend a few minutes watching the window before you return to your block, but the shuttles are just points of light, reflecting the sun.

When you strap yourself into the chair that will cushion you during initial acceleration, you’re already calculating a timeline in your head. You have three more sweeps of service on this ship, but after that? Maybe you’ll take a trip on back to EXPL-13 and see how things go.

Do you feel guilty for subverting justice? Surprisingly, you can’t really find guilt anywhere. Instead, there’s a weirdly foreign sense of unrest. You don’t feel like you did the wrong thing. You feel like maybe, for the first time, you’ve done something that was both illegal and right. Is that possible? You’ve never heard of such a thing before. And when you think of all those other Helmsman candidates—not just the cullbait, but also the ones who will be processed down to bones and sinew and sizzling psionic brains and installed in the engine of a battleship—you can’t help but wonder about their own quadrantmates and how much that must hurt everyone involved.

But you can’t fight for everyone. Right?


	7. Chapter 7

**Gamzee**

Your head’s all muzzy when they drop you off, and you really don’t get right enough to figure out what’s going on until you’re in the van, halfway back to Feferi’s farm.

You’re laying on your back on the back seat, staring up at the van ceiling where the fabric is coming untacked and is hanging down in billowy bulges. You poke at it for a bit, marveling at the feeling of being able to control your own hands.

“Gamzee?” says a voice next to you. Is that your Tavbro? You struggle to sit up, but you’re still all woozy and instead you just flail.

Tavbro’s beaming face comes into view over your head. “Hey,” he says.

“I didn’t think having my thinkpan shoved in a ship would be like this,” you say, or try to say. It’s mostly slurred.

“You’re still drugged,” Fefsis says from the front seat, where she’s driving. “It’s ok. It’ll wear off soon. We’re taking you back home. They let you go.”

“Home?” You’re very confused. Last you really remember, you were being dragged out of that place by flaysquadders, and you really can’t think up a way that you could possibly have gotten back here.

“Yeah. Home,” says Tavbro. “We got some help from some other trolls and they let you go.” He glances over at Feferi.

The van turns and you hear the familiar sound of wheels on the gravel driveway. Fefsis stops the van and Tavbro opens the side door, and you blink in the bright moonlight.

Maybe this is some weird brain spasm and not real life, but you’ll take it. You’ve got your Tavbro here and your Fefsis and probably somewhere around here is Eribro too, and as long as you’ve got them, life is just peachy.  


* * *

  
\-- carcinoGeneticist began trolling terminallyCapricious \--

CG: TAVROS GAVE ME YOUR USERNAME SO I COULD SEE HOW YOU WERE DOING.  
CG: YOU DON’T KNOW ME BUT I HELPED THEM GET YOU RELEASED FROM THE BATTLESHIP RETRIBUTION.  
CG: I JUST THOUGHT I WOULD  
CG: UH  
CG: SAY HI.  
CG: SO, HI.  
TC: HeY tHeRe My MaIn MoThErFuCkEr.  
TC: tAvBrO dId GiVe Me ThE lOwDoWn On YoUr RiGhTeOuS rEsCuE mIsSiOn.  
TC: ThAnKs FoR gIvInG mE sOmE mOrE tImE iN tHiS bEaUtIfUl WoRlD.  
TC: HoNk  
TC: :o)  
CG: OH FUCK.  
CG: I’VE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.


End file.
